And Alex understood that Scotty Hausmann did not exist. He was a word casing in human form: a shell whose essence has vanished.

Read at the level at which you want to write. Reading is the nourishment that feeds the kind of writing you want to do.

happened as I listened: I felt pain. Not in my head, not in my arm, not in my leg; everywhere at once. I told myself there was no difference between being “inside” and being “outside,” that it all came down to X’s and O’s that could be acquired in any number of different ways, but the pain increased to a point where I thought I might collapse, and I limped away.

Redemption, transformation--God how she wanted these things. Every day, every minute. Didn't everyone?

[I]t may be that a crowd at a particular moment of history creates the object to justify its gathering.

I'm very interested in the way the Internet has changed teenage life. Obviously it's very different from when I grew up, when there weren't even answering machines, much less computers. I was telling my children this the other day, and the little one said, "Did you have electricity, Mom?" and I was like okay, enough, kid.

The answers were maddeningly absent—it was like trying to remember a song that you knew made you feel a certain way, without a title, artist, or even a few bars to bring it back.